“O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye . . . O heavens! is’t possible a young maid’s wits Should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”[78:3]
Her pitiful condition soon reinforces his determination to be revenged: “This nothing’s more than matter,”[78:4] he exclaims, and the spectator re-echoes the cry as he gazes on the enraged brother and the afflicted girl whose sorrows have been more than she can bear. In her madness there is not a jot of the maniacal frenzy which is the great characteristic of Lear. Her nature was ever too gentle:
“Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favour and to prettiness.”[79:1]
Though of a wholly different nature from the insanity of Lear, Shakespeare’s delineation of Ophelia’s madness is in its way quite as masterly. We see nothing of it in its earlier stages—indeed it would seem to have been of sudden birth and to have developed quickly. In her ravings there is none of that force and pregnancy which marks the invective of Lear; two fixed ideas dominate her mind and constantly recur to it; apart from these she is totally incoherent. We are told, by those who know, that her insanity takes the form of erotomania, “the fine name for that form of insanity in which the sentiment of love is prominent;”[79:2] we should suppose, indeed, from what she says, that her father’s death is its chief cause, as the King and Queen naturally think also; but this can hardly be assumed, for we cannot say how far she confuses the two causes of her affliction.
The Queen’s account of the death of Ophelia is in keeping both with the tone of the “mad scene” and with the nature of Ophelia’s malady. Exquisitely pathetic, it tells how the distraught girl, obeying a common instinct of the insane for floral decoration (an instinct which we also find in “King Lear”) clambered with “fantastic garlands,” on to a willow which overhung a stream. Mad folk are notoriously regardless of danger, and Ophelia’s rashness led to a premature grave:
“An envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.”[80:1]